Edgar Allan Poe
She was a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee. And evil was the hour when she saw, and loved, and wedded the painter. He, passionate, studious, austere, and having already a bride in his Art; she a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee; all light and smiles, and frolicsome as the young fawn; loving and cherishing all things; hating only the Art which was her rival.
Edgar Allan Poe
- Never Bet the Devil Your Head.
A novelist, for example, need have no care of his moral. It is there, that is to say, it is somewhere and the moral and the critics can take care of themselves. When the proper time arrives, all that the gentleman intended, and all that he did not intend, will be brought to light, in the "Dial" or the "Down Easter" together with all that he ought to have intended, and the rest that he clearly meant to intend, so that it will all come very straight in the end.
Edgar Allan Poe
- The Island of the Fay
A somber yet beautiful and peaceful gloom here pervaded all things. The shade of the trees fell heavily upon the water and seemed to bury itself therein, impregnating the depths of the element with darkness.
Edgar Allan Poe
- The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities - that theory to which the most glorious objects of human research are indebted for the most glorious of illustration.
Edgar Allan Poe
But as in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
Edgar Allan Poe
- Eleonora
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence -- whether much that is glorious -- whether all that is profound -- does not spring from disease of thought -- from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
Edgar Allan Poe
By the dim light of an accidental lamp, tall, antique, worm-eaten, wooden tenements were seen tottering to their fall, in directions so many and capricious, that scarce the semblance of a passage was discernible between them.
Edgar Allan Poe
- Ligeia
In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.
Edgar Allan Poe
- Berenice
It is more than probably that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.
Edgar Allan Poe
"It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic." - from The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
Alvin Schwartz
- The Hearse Song
Don't you ever laugh as the hearse goes by, for you may be the next one to die. They wrap you up in a big white sheet from your head down to your feet. They put you in a big black box and cover you up with dirt and rocks. All goes well for about a week, then your coffin begins to leak. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle in your snout, they eat your eyes, they eat your nose, they eat the jelly between your toes. They eat the jelly between your toes...
